Spirits in Bondage | Page 9

at once from far and near,?They all held out their arms to me,?Crying in their melody,?"Leap in! Leap in and take thy fill?Of all the cosmic good and ill,?Be as the Living ones that know?Enormous joy, enormous woe,?Pain beyond thought and fiery bliss:?For all thy study hunted this,?On wings of magic to arise,?And wash from off thy filmed eyes?The cloud of cold mortality,?To find the real life and be?As are the children of the deep!?Be bold and dare the glorious leap,?Or to thy shame, go, slink again?Back to the narrow ways of men."?So all these mocked me as I stood?Striving to wake because I feared the flood.
XXIII. Alexandrines
There is a house that most of all on earth I hate.?Though I have passed through many sorrows and have been?In bloody fields, sad seas, and countries desolate,?Yet most I fear that empty house where the grasses green?Grow in the silent court the gaping flags between,?And down the moss-grown paths and terrace no man treads?Where the old, old weeds rise deep on the waste garden beds. Like eyes of one long dead the empty windows stare?And I fear to cross the garden, I fear to linger there,?For in that house I know a little, silent room?Where Someone's always waiting, waiting in the gloom?To draw me with an evil eye, and hold me fastYet?thither doom will drive me and He will win at last.
XXIV. In Praise of Solid People
Thank God that there are solid folk?Who water flowers and roll the lawn,?And sit an sew and talk and smoke,?And snore all through the summer dawn.
Who pass untroubled nights and days?Full-fed and sleepily content,?Rejoicing in each other's praise,?Respectable and innocent.
Who feel the things that all men feel,?And think in well-worn grooves of thought,?Whose honest spirits never reel?Before man's mystery, overwrought.
Yet not unfaithful nor unkind,?with work-day virtues surely staid,?Theirs is the sane and humble mind,?And dull affections undismayed.
O happy people! I have seen?No verse yet written in your praise,?And, truth to tell, the time has been?I would have scorned your easy ways.
But now thro' weariness and strife?I learn your worthiness indeed,?The world is better for such life?As stout suburban people lead.
Too often have I sat alone?When the wet night falls heavily,?And fretting winds around me moan,?And homeless longing vexes me
For lore that I shall never know,?And visions none can hope to see,?Till brooding works upon me so?A childish fear steals over me.
I look around the empty room,?The clock still ticking in its place,?And all else silent as the tomb,?Till suddenly, I think, a face
Grows from the darkness just beside.?I turn, and lo! it fades away,?And soon another phantom tide?Of shifting dreams begins to play,
And dusky galleys past me sail,?Full freighted on a faerie sea;?I hear the silken merchants hail?Across the ringing waves to me
-Then suddenly, again, the room,?Familiar books about me piled,?And I alone amid the gloom,?By one more mocking dream beguiled.
And still no neared to the Light,?And still no further from myself,?Alone and lost in clinging night?-(The clock's still ticking on the shelf).
Then do I envy solid folk?Who sit of evenings by the fire,?After their work and doze and smoke,?And are not fretted by desire.
Part III The Escape
XXV. Song of the Pilgrims
O Dwellers at the back of the North Wind,?What have we done to you? How have we sinned?Wandering the Earth from Orkney unto Ind?
With many deaths our fellowship is thinned,?Our flesh is withered in the parching wind,?Wandering the earth from Orkney unto Ind.
We have no rest. We cannot turn again?Back to the world and all her fruitless pain,?Having once sought the land where ye remain.
Some say ye are not. But, ah God! we know?That somewhere, somewhere past the Northern snow?Waiting for us the red-rose gardens blow:
-The red-rose and the white-rose gardens blow?In the green Northern land to which we go,?Surely the ways are long and the years are slow.
We have forsaken all things sweet and fair,?We have found nothing worth a moment's care?Because the real flowers are blowing there.
Land of the Lotus fallen from the sun,?Land of the Lake from whence all rivers run,?Land where the hope of all our dreams is won!
Shall we not somewhere see at close of day?The green walls of that country far away,?And hear the music of her fountains play?
So long we have been wandering all this while?By many a perilous sea and drifting isle,?We scarce shall dare to look thereon and smile.
Yea, when we are drawing very near to thee,?And when at last the ivory port we see?Our hearts will faint with mere felicity:
But we shall wake again in gardens bright?Of green and gold for infinite delight,?Sleeping beneath the solemn mountains white,?While from the flowery copses still unseen?Sing out the crooning birds that ne'er have been?Touched by the hand of winter frore and lean;
And ever living queens that grow not old?And poets wise in robes of faerie gold?Whisper a